The Bones in the University
by TrthIsOutThere
Summary: Temperance Brennan wasn't always the genius that we know and love. At one point, she had been on the journey to be the best.


Summary: Temperance Brennan wasn't always the genius that we know and love. At one point, she had been on the journey to be the best. She had been wrong on many occasions. She had to have learned at some point. So here it is. Hopefully, I'll be able to work other characters in.

A/N: So, this is the first thing I've written in about five months. And I feel bad because I have SO MANY other things that need to be worked on, but I really felt this one. It just flowed so well from brain to fingers to screen. That said, I can't promise any quick updates, but I will try to get one out as much as I can. This is loosely based on my experiences as a forensic anthropology student. And I will write about methods that forensic anthropologists use and as the terminology gets tricky (since we know Brennan will only use the accurate terminology lol), I'll try not to sound know-it-all. They will only be mentioned in dialogue hopefully.

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><p>She had started off as a biology student. She had concentrated all her energy on classes in genetics and anatomy and physiology, focused every ounce of her ridiculous intelligence on learning everything about the human body she could. She learned how it moved, how it worked, down to the cellular level, and even further into the microscopic bodies within the cellular walls. She had earned most of her general education credits by filling her Saturdays with tests, each one granting her the credits to make up for frivolous lecture classes that would have done nothing but hinder her ability to do what she loved to do. She had filled the extra space in her schedule with independent studies that allowed her to delve deeper into the medico-legal field and learn all she could about cause and mechanism of death. When her advisor told her she had to take some classes in politics, she had argued; when they told her she had to take fine arts credits, she nearly went ballistic, ranting and raving about the waste of time those classes would prove. She knew what she wanted to do; a well-rounded university background was trivial and useless. Her plan was clear: she was going to be a medical examiner. Her mind was made up and there was no changing it.<p>

Or so she thought.

Walking to class one day toward the end of her fourth semester (was she technically a sophomore since she would be graduating at the end of the next year?), she passed by a door that was normally shut on the first floor of the science building. The door was nondescript, an oak-stained door with numbers beside it indicating it was an official room with mysterious contents behind it. Mysterious until _that_ day.

The door was cracked open, enough for passers-by to see the table covered in plastic with a pile of light brown objects scattered across the tabletop. Two or three students milled about quietly, pulling books from the small library and reading intently. She stopped dead in her tracks, one of the football players walking behind her to their basic bio class bowled straight into her, but she was too mesmerized by the student placing the skeletal elements in anatomical position to notice. He made some jerk comment to her about watching where she was walking and added some term to the end of his sentence that may have sounded like "dweeb." He and his friends laughed loudly as they continued down the hallway (college had turned out to be no different than high school, only in college she wasn't known as the super-popular Russ Brennan's little sister and had no protection from the mocking voices of her fellow students). She pushed the door open further and stepped curiously into the room. The door creaked loudly and three sets of frenzied eyes looked up at her from their work. She didn't notice though; she was enraptured by the bones on the table.

It took several seconds to register that the guy at the table was speaking to her and she met his expectant expression with a look half-way between concern and wide-eyed curiosity. Whatever he had asked her hung awkwardly in the air and the other students went back to work, either scribbling in notebooks or typing furiously on their computers. "What are you doing with these remains?" she finally asked, motioning toward the partially-completed skeleton on the table and blue eyes threatening to burn a hole in his forehead.

The guy's brow furrowed deeply and then he shook his head in amusement, gently placing the skull in his hands on a round donut-shaped pillow at the top of the table and then leaned on both hands over the skeleton. "It's a skeletal analysis project."

"Skeletal analysis," she rolled the phrase around her mouth and her head. She liked the feel. She liked the taste. Her eyes dropped back down to the remains. "Is it for a class?"

The guy's head bobbed up and down. "All of us are forensic anthropology students."

"Forensic anthropology," she said, nodding. She had read about the field and its role in the medical-legal field. It was a mere infant compared to her chosen field of pathology. "What does a skeletal analysis mean?"

The guy cast a glance around the room. The other students appeared to be completely ignorant of their conversation. He picked up a bone from the table and held it up for her to see. She stepped up next to him and examined the bone closely.

"It's a bone," she said, matter-of-factly. "Ulna."

"Right," the guy agreed. "But look right here." He ran his finger over a piece of bone that looked much different than the rest. "This is a remodeled fracture. The healing is almost complete. With a few more years' time, this would have disappeared." He put down the first bone and picked up a second. It was odd shaped, but she still knew its name.

"Pelvis."

"Innominate," he corrected gently. "We call it the innominate. You need both pieces for it to be the pelvis." He placed his pointer finger against a flat surface on the front and indicated the angle it made to the bone with his thumb. "This is one part of what we call the Phenice method. The angle that I'm making is the sub-puic angle. The small angle indicates that this is a male." He placed the bone back down on the table. "Each bone adds to the story of who this person was. Each case report is the empty pages of a book. We have to write their story."

Her eyes slid back over the remains on the table taking in every millimeter of bone. That day, Temperance Brennan felt alive for the first time in years.

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><p>Truth: Three years ago (Spring semester 2008), my first year at my current university, I passed the osteology lab and geeked out about a set of remains on the table. I didn't stop in and ask about them, but I did tell my friend that I was going to take study forensic anthropology even if it killed me. Much less eventful haha<p> 


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